There is, of course, the critical justice for every daughter, every son, every sibling and every spouse of every one of the 19 or more victims that Bulger allegedly killed in his multi-decade, FBI-sanctioned reign of terror.

There is justice for South Boston, where the mobster ran roughshod over an entire neighborhood, allegedly murdering and maiming and flooding Broadway with drugs that ruined countless other lives.

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There is justice for every one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of State Police investigators, DEA agents, and Boston Police officers who saw endless and arduous hours of surveillance, risky bugging operations, and honest detective work compromised by Bulger and the corrupt FBI agents with whom he consorted.

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But beyond the families, beyond the borders of Southie, beyond the cadre of people who have chased Bulger’s shadow across continents and decades, there is another justice that is as broad as it is deep.

It’s about Boston, all of Boston. It’s about how James Whitey Bulger turned a city of natural skeptics into a community of unabashed cynics when news exploded in the 1990s that the FBI, the nation’s foremost law enforcement agency, coddled this alleged killer.

A federal indictment says that 19 died while the FBI had this relationship with Whitey Bulger. Many were tortured. Grown men and women lived in fear. Others lived in mourning. All the while, Bulger, late at night, dined with FBI agents, slipped quietly into their houses for casual talks, bribed them, exchanged gifts with them, all of it giving license to him to kill.

Bulger’s close relationship with the FBI, first revealed by the Globe in the 1980s, began with his ever-onerous FBI handler, John Connolly, though it didn’t end there. It splashed on all his colleagues in the FBI’s Boston office. It flowed to his bosses, each one of whom was inexplicably mesmerized by Bulger and his equally murderous cohort, Steve Flemmi. It seeped deeply into the US Attorney’s office in Boston, where some high-level prosecutors looked as ridiculous as the star-struck agents on the streets. It extended to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, because what happens in Boston doesn’t stay in Boston.

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It was about the frantic efforts to sink La Cosa Nostra, about which Bulger was of dubious help, but it was really about something far less grand. It was about the blind ambition of so many FBI agents who saw Bulger as a path upward. And along that journey, they found in Bulger an unlikely – and opportunistic – friend.

Finally, in the mid 1990s, as US District Court Judge Mark Wolf relentlessly sought the truth about the insidious relationships between the law and the lawless, a city watched in horror. FBI agents took the stand to detail deadly leaks and payoffs. Connolly was later convicted of murder – an FBI agent, in the line of work, convicted in someone’s death. This city, no city, had ever seen anything like it.

Bostonians, by nature, are not the most trusting people. Maybe it’s as simple as the weather, which never fails to disappoint. Maybe it’s the politicians, who always seemed more craven here than just about anywhere else. Maybe it’s just the ingrained crustiness that comes with being a native New Englander.

But when the FBI’s relationship with Bulger burst into the open, a city’s reflexive suspicion transformed into the hardened conviction that nothing, absolutely nothing, was ever straight. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation was contributing to murder and mayhem on Boston’s streets, then what person, what institution could this city ever trust again?

That answer arrived late Wednesday night, and it couldn’t have been any more shocking: The FBI. For 16 years, as Bulger’s alleged victims were found in crude, roadside graves, as the mobster in abstentia was portrayed in a major Hollywood movie, as the mythology of the lovable thug gave way to the portrait of the killer sociopath, two key questions were always tossed around this city as casually as Frisbees: Would Bulger ever be caught? Would the feds ever allow it?

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Ends up, it’s yes to both. And in that, there is an almost surreal opportunity, even possibility, for a community to heal. The very same law enforcement agency that tore apart families, betrayed their colleagues, and violated a city’s fragile faith is now leading the recovery, another bizarre twist in an already unimaginable tale.

Anything goes from here. Bulger’s cell phone records, bank statements, and the rest of the trove that agents pulled from his Santa Monica apartment may or may not tie him to people back home. He may or may not decide to take down other agents and politicians in his fall. He may or may not lead detectives to the graves of other missing people.

But in the continued uncertainty, the people of Boston have this: They have Whitey, and in that cell isn’t just an old man, but the newest seeds of trust.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.